Interpretation of spoken or other verbal requests or instructions is an important function in the operations of many organizations. Organizations often require employees to handle spoken requests, often from customers who may not phrase the requests in any standard way. Training of these employees often includes presenting sample requests to the employees, observing the employee's response to the requests, determining if the employee has responded correctly and giving guidance to the employee if the response is incorrect. Such training often requires a human trainer to present the sample requests and evaluate the employee's response. The use of a human trainer imposes costs for the labor of the trainer.
One specific activity which requires training in the interpretation of spoken or other verbal instructions is routing of telephone calls to an organization. Most calls received by a large enterprise or service center are then transferred from a centralized telephone number through the operation of a call center. Calls to the centralized telephone number are answered by an automated call router or a human operator. The incoming calls are then routed to a destination based on information received from the customer, such as a touchtone entry, a statement of the call destination, a description of activities or services to which the call relates, or a more generalized statement of the issue which the customer wishes to address. A skilled human operator can discern a caller's intentions even if they are expressed in indirect ways, but an operator must be trained in order to route calls successfully.
Frequently, call centers often experience a high degree of turnover among their human operators. A continuous influx of new operators leads to a continuous need to train these new operators. Typically, training of call center operators is performed by human instructors. A human instructor can present a query to an operator trainee, interpret the trainee's response, and determine whether or not the trainee's response is correct. If the trainee operator's response is not correct, the instructor can point out that the response is not correct and can furnish guidance about which elements of the query indicate the correct destination of the call.
However, the labor costs associated with the use of human trainers constitutes a major element of operating costs for a call center. Moreover, it may be difficult for the call center to provide training quickly enough to keep pace with the influx of new operator trainees. It would be desirable to be able to train call center operators or other persons required to interpret spoken requests and other verbal information using an automated system which could present a query to a trainee, identify the trainee's response as correct or incorrect and provide guidance to the trainee if the trainee's response was incorrect.